Sports fans often find themselves in a dilemma. There are too many games to follow and not enough time. Newspapers print box scores, statistics and game summaries. Other media like television and radio provide highlights from the game. Each of these methods provide some detail about the flow of the game, but they still omit important data.
For example, many newspapers provide box scores for baseball games that report how many times each player hit the ball per time at bat. They also provide a breakdown of which innings the runs are scored. These are useful numbers but they do not convey how crucial each hit was to the final score. They do not show which player's hit sparked a rally or which player's final strike finished off the game. Some newspapers run additional information in game summaries or news stories, but space constraints often make complete descriptions for all games prohibitively expensive.
Television newscasts are often just as limited. The small amount of time available often forces television news organizations to limit themselves to reporting the final score. When they do try to provide insight into the dynamics of the individual games, they often rely upon one or two clips of visually dramatic plays. These short glimpses often fail to capture information about the entire game.
Other sports often receive even less coverage. Statistics for basketball games and football games receive less space. Soccer, lacrosse and hockey are rarely treated to more than spot coverage. High school, college and women's teams are also rarely discussed in depth because there is less perceived demand for information about the outcome of their games.
The raw statistics provided by the newspapers are often complicated to understand. It is difficult to quickly determine whether a game was close. There is no simple way to determine if one player's actions were largely responsible for the outcome of the game. For instance, a baseball box score may report that one player hit successfully in all four chances while another ballplayer only hit once. The basic box scores do not immediately show that one particular hit by one player drove in the winning run at the end of the game.
The pages of raw statistics are also difficult to search. Some games are more closely fought than others, but the only way to find one of these games is to read all of the statistics. This makes it time consuming to study the results in the necessary detail.
The sporting world needs a more concise method of making the ebb and flow of a game apparent to people interested in the outcome after the game is finished. The method allows the fans to quickly determine how close the game was and what were the significant moments that contributed to the outcome of the game.
Another important need is for a device for collecting this information. Many small, portable computers can be modified with the addition of software to function as devices which collect the raw information about the progress of a sporting contest and then render the information as a graphical summary of the game. If such a device were to exist, many players, coaches, parents and fans would be able to collect detailed descriptions of the game on the site. They could generate a graphical summary either during the game or afterwards and study the effects of various significant moments on the outcome.
The portable device could also serve remote fans by transmitting an image of the graphical summary to a remote location through either wired or wireless communications. This may be done through any combination of telephony, electronic mail, telecopying machines and other communications technologies. These people at a distance could easily look at this image in either electronic or printed form and learn the outcome of the game.
Some fans may want to duplicate some of the tension and suspense of the game without spending the time to travel to the contest or watch it in its entirety on television. The graphical summary can be animated so that different parts of the graphical summary are drawn in sequence. If the parts of the summary are drawn in a chronological sequence based upon when they happened in the contest, then fans can simulate some of the dynamic tension of the game in the relatively short amount of time it takes to animate the graphical summary.
Such an invention would serve the interests of players, coaches, parent, fans and sports historians. A device like this that could provide the information in readily accessible, graphical form would allow people to study the outcome of the games and quickly determine the most important and salient facts about the play.